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I dropped by this site because my friend’s daughter has Cushings and I wanted to learn more. Is there any chance that Cushings might be manageable or improvable in a way similar to what Izabella Wentz proposes for Hashimotos?

I dropped by this site because my friend’s daughter has Cushings and I wanted to learn more. Is there any chance that Cushings might be manageable or improvable in a way similar to what Izabella Wentz proposes for Hashimotos?

Jayne was diagnosed with Cushing's disease and became pregnant despite her illness, which usually makes women infertile. Jayne was the subject of a Live Interview in the Cushings Help Voice Chat / Podcast series.

I would love to take one of the surveys mentioned in this news article. My Cushing’s went into “remission” just over 31 years ago but I still feel the effects of having had it. Pre-Cushing’s I had no problem working a full day, having a piano studio overflowing with students, going out at night, cleaning the house, being a normal mom...

Pituitary tumors, like those that cause Cushing’s disease, have significant effects on a patient’s physical, mental, and social health, all of which influence their work status and health-related quality of life.

Michelle is from Santa Monica, CA. She is not yet diagnosed with Cushing's but gained 50 pounds with no change in activity or eating. She sent an article on Cyclical Cushing's to her doctor at the Mayo Clinic.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the clinical use of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner — the ultra-high-field 7T Terra MRI — with unprecedented resolution that allows for more reliable images of the brain. The approach recently allowed the precise localization of a small tumor in the pituitary gland, which standard MRI had failed t […]

If you’ve got your finger on the pulse of health trends, it’s likely you’ve been hearing the current buzzwords “cortisol creates belly fat” and “cortisol causes muscle wasting and fat storage.” These are the type of catch phrases that gain momentum every few years. And although some of the fads and trends showing up seasonally in fitness are myths, this caut […]

Today is the 31st anniversary of my pituitary surgery at NIH. As one can imagine, it hasn’t been all happiness and light. Most of my journey has been documented here and on the message boards – and elsewhere around the web.

Patients with growth hormone deficiency due to nonfunctioning pituitary adenoma experienced excessive morbidity due to cerebral infarction and sepsis regardless of whether they received long-term GH therapy, whereas treatment was associated with a normal incidence of type 2 diabetes, despite higher BMI and more severe hypopituitarism in treated patients..

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Preoperative identification of patients with silent adrenocorticotrophic hormone-secreting tumors could potentially change the approach to management. A new study aimed to determine whether a preoperative adrenocorticotrophic hormone stimulation test for evaluation of nonfunctional pituitary macroadenoma could aid in identifying adrenocorticotrophic hormone-staining pathology yielded large variability and did not allow clinical utility.

Thus, researchers concluded that larger, multicenter research is needed to determine whether this test can be useful.

“As ACTH stimulation tests are performed routinely when evaluating macroadenoma when there is no suspicion for a state of endogenous hypercortisolism, we sought to determine if the test could reliably identify these pathologies during the preoperative evaluation. We hypothesized that patients with subclinical Cushing’s disease or silent ACTH-secreting tumors would have a higher delta cortisol on the ACTH stimulation tests vs. other types of macroadenoma pathologies,” Kevin Pantalone, DO, ECNU, FACE, staff endocrinologist and director of clinical research in the department of endocrinology at Cleveland Clinic, told Endocrine Today.

Pantalone and colleagues performed a retrospective chart review of 148 patients with pituitary macroadenoma who underwent preoperative ACTH stimulation tests, with the goal of determining whether the test can aid in the identification of ACTH-staining pathology.

According to data reported at the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists Annual Scientific and Clinical Congress, the ACTH-staining group had higher mean basal cortisol levels compared with the non-ACTH-staining (P = .012), other staining (P = .018) and the non-staining (P = .012) tumors. The researchers found no significant differences in maximal delta cortisol between the groups.

“While we found basal cortisol levels were higher in patients with ACTH-staining pituitary microadenoma vs. non-ACTH-staining macroadenoma, the large variability in cortisol values did not allow for clinical utility,” Pantalone told Endocrine Today.

“Unfortunately, in the end, our study was limited by the number of cases with ACTH-staining pathology. Thus, we were unable to determine if the ACTH stimulation test could reliably assist clinicians in potentially identifying ACTH-staining pathology in the preoperative setting,” he said. “A multicenter study, affording a large number of ACTH-staining tumors, is needed. This may allow for us to determine if the ACTH-stimulation test can really be clinically useful in preoperatively identifying ACTH-staining pathology.” – by Amber Cox